“We have failed,” he thundered. “We have created a great corporate welfare programme. Our users are the richest companies in the world. We’ve enabled companies like Google to be creative, but in contrast, unless they are working for those companies, developers are likely to go uncompensated.”
The fallout from this imbalance is exemplified by OpenSSL, secure communications software used by almost every organisation that, when a critical bug emerged, was found to be maintained by a handful of unpaid volunteers.
But that’s just one of the baleful consequences of the way things have panned out, according to Perens.
Open source has been wildly successful, but largely in areas – operating systems, webservers, middleware, networking and systems software – that are invisible to the average user. In contrast, user-facing success stories are few and far between, Firefox and LibreOffice being the exceptions that prove this rule.
Because they are mostly unpaid, the marketing, design and other work needed to create software for “the common person” tends to be left to corporations who take their work (96% of all software contains open-source components) and run with it.
Perens argues that most open source developers are driven by altruistic motives, and that many are dismayed to see their work co-opted in ways that their work is used, counting himself prominent among them.
“I am an open source developer, I still write code every day,” Perens told Computing after his keynote. “And I am angry that we have not met all of the goals that we had, that I had personally, that we are not as good at doing good as we potentially could be. I’m angry that we run a corporate welfare programme, that companies that wanted to be our partners have now gotten everything they want and are giving us a bit of the middle finger.
“I’m not out to make millionaires richer. I used to work for Steve Jobs at Pixar. If I wanted to make millionaires richer, I’d still be there.”
Corporate capture
The invisibility of most open source software, buried deep in the stack, makes corporate co-option easier, with company’s taking advantage of gaps and quirks in licencing. Android, for example, is open-source Linux overlaid by a proprietary Google layer, which as well as supporting apps allows Google to “make you the product” through surveillance, in a way that may in direct opposition to the open source ethos.
The lack of compensation also forces open source developers to narrow their horizons, delivering code for people like them rather than the masses. Because they are coders, not support people, this allows the big players to wrap themselves around the contracts. “Users want one throat to choke, they don’t want hundreds of support vendors,” Perens noted.
Another target for his ire is IBM. Red Hat twisted the rules with its GPL circumvention for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, he argued, but under IBM things have got worse.
“The only thing that made that acceptable was that Red Hat also distributed CentOS. Well, they stopped doing that. And so here we see a company that literally makes billions of dollars on this, RHEL is one third of paid-for Linux systems and because of that GPL circumvention, [making distribution of code changes impossible].”
New ways to fund developers
In fact, IBM’s culling of CentOS three years ago was the trigger for Perens to create another initiative, which has the working title of “Post Open”, to run alongside open source and provide funding direct to open-source projects.
The idea is to create third-party, nonprofit companies like an 501(c)6 organisations in the US, whose job it would be to distribute funds to developers and maintainers based on contributions on GitHub and other platforms. Funding would come from companies that use the software, with a threshold to allow free use by smaller organisations. Large organisations would save from a much reduced compliance bill, as the new rules would be far easier to navigate than the 100-odd open source licences in circulation, he argues. Instead, those millions could go towards supporting projects directly.
Perens, who is seeking support for this idea, admits it’s a long shot, but said that something needs to be done “because all the unforeseen consequences of open source are piling up.”
And after all, he suggested, he has a history of making improbable ideas work.
“If had told you 26 years ago, we’re going to make software that takes over the entirety of business that we give away, and we don’t even ask money for, and we’re going to make our own encyclopaedia, and it’s going to put Microsoft Encarta out of business, you’d have said I was crazy.”
Wanda Parisien is a computing expert who navigates the vast landscape of hardware and software. With a focus on computer technology, software development, and industry trends, Wanda delivers informative content, tutorials, and analyses to keep readers updated on the latest in the world of computing.
